Facebook’s Conceal, Callback hell and a listening Pi – Snippets

Facebook’s Conceal revealed: Facebook have open sourced Conceal, a library for encrypting files on Android devices. The company uses the library for encrypting data that its apps store on SD cards. It uses pre-selected OpenSSL algorithms, picked for efficient memory management and speed, and gets the library down to 85KB by not trying to be a general purpose crypto kit. An interesting bit of pragmatism which means Facebook’s apps can happily encrypt on low-end Android devices, Conceal is available under a BSD licence with its source on GitHub.

Callback hell: Callbacks in Node.js can get pretty gnarly if you do everything with inline anonymous functions. This blog posting from Strongloop is a handy summary of some of the ways, from nesting, modularisation, async, promises and (soon to come to Node) ES6 generators. So callback, much techniques.

A Pi that listens: Meanwhile, a nice little Instructable covers converting an old bakelite Televox intercom into a voice controlled personal assistant by popping a Raspberry Pi inside.. and a sound board… and some software of course… It’ll probably be quite hard to find another fine bakelite intercom, but the rest of the projects a good starting point for assembling your own style of smart box…